1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a power supply control device for predicting or estimating an amount of power consumption in an apparatus such as, for example, a server apparatus, an information processing apparatus, or computer and performing power supply control on a power supply unit.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent apparatuses, scalability for processing ability and field upgrading at customers' locations are required. Upon such upgrading, the configuration of an apparatus is divided into a plurality of blocks for respective functions, and new blocks are added in compliance with the processing ability as required. In this case, it is necessary to grasp a power consumption as to whether the power supply provided on the apparatus can sufficiently supply the amount of power to be consumed by the respective blocks, and if the amount of power consumption exceeds the capacity of the power supply, it will be needed to provide an additional power supply or replace the existing power supply with a new one having an increased power supply capacity.
In the grasping of the power consumption, for example, the amount of power consumption of the apparatus before upgrading thereof is first grasped, and an amount of power consumption increased as a result of upgrading is then estimated so as to determine whether the increased power consumption can be accommodated by the capacity of the existing power supply provided on the apparatus. If it is determined that the capacity of the existing power supply is insufficient, the power supply capacity is then increased.
In the past, however, the grasping of the power consumption in such an apparatus is carried out, for example, based on the number of components constituting each function, or the number of blocks divided for each component.
In the grasping of the power consumption as described above, however, in order to serve for simplification thereof and to grasp the power consumption on the safe side so as to avoid a shortage of the capacity of the power supply, the amount of power consumption in each block is often set to be equal to that of a block having a largest configuration which consumes the greatest power among the plural blocks, or the amount of power consumption for each block is set to the greatest possible power consumption which can be taken for the greatest possible configuration of each component. As a result, there are many cases in which the overall power consumption of the apparatus is overestimated.
Accordingly, in the case of field upgrading for example, as a result of the overestimation of the power consumption amount in spite of the fact that the existing power supply is in actuality sufficient for the power consumption, the capacity of the existing power supply can often be determined to be short and hence a new power supply is added or the existing power supply is replaced by a new larger one. Such a replacement of the power supply or addition of the new power supply often gives rise to problems such as useless and wasteful consumption of resources and unnecessary high costs.
On the other hand, in the case where the amount of power consumption is underestimated, if the estimation of the power consumption is less than the actual power consumption, there will be serious situations. That is, a shortage of the power supply capacity results, causing the function of the apparatus to halt, or important information stored might be lost.
Moreover, in the past, there is another problem in that when a power supply having a capacity insufficient for the power consumption of a device is connected to the device, there is no appropriate measure to cope with such a situation, thus giving rise to a critical accident as described above.